The Apology the United States Owes the Vietnam Veterans

It is hard to imagine a piece of yourself being left in a totally different country.  A part of your life that will never be looked at again.  It's so sad to think that once a certain age is passed, we as human beings can never go back, and redo. Never live that age in our life ever again.  This is what I think about when I talk about the hardship of those who either joined or where drafted during the Vietnam War, they will never have that innocence again.

When I read the Holy Bible and go to the scripture in Ecclesiastes 3 v 3 (A time to kill...).  I often find myself wondering what the young boys eighteen and nineteen years old who were taken to the hottest war zone in the history of America could have been thinking when they had to jump from those choppers ready to fight.  When I think about myself being an eighteen-year-old boy having to ask my dad can I borrow his car keys because I wasn't a man yet it often brings tears to my eyes because the Vietnam Veterans never had a chance to live their teenage childhood.

Our country took eighteen and nineteen-year-old boys and put loaded weapons in their hands, not car keys and told them to go kill.  They were boys who were supposedly trained to be men, (sure).  They were dropped in the hottest war zone the United States of America had ever been in.  Their human instinct for survival is all they knew they had to rely on in order to be able to come home and see their loved ones again.  There was nothing left to rethink and no time to look back while in the jungles of Vietnam.  Second guessing would cost a soldier his life.  His only means of survival was kill or be killed.  When we think about “survival of the fittest” in the jungles of Vietnam these young boys had to become men overnight and warriors on the battlefield.  A battlefield in the jungles of Vietnam where the sanctity of life was being counted by sixteen-minute intervals.  Yes, sixteen minutes that was the equivalency of life which added up to how long an American soldier was expected to live in Vietnam.  Where did their innocence go?  What was being presented to the minds of young boys who were trying very hard to be men, boys that had never held a weapon before.  A weapon that now became their best friend and was even closer to them their very own heartbeat.  They became each other’s eyes, ears, etc. all five senses were in tone with the other because what one soldier did not see the other did.  This is where the comradery comes into play.  This is what the military training of these young boys taught them about brotherhood about friendship and about family, this is who they had become.  Family, a group of boys fighting as one, together, and trying to make it back home alive.  Little did they know that returning home would become even more of a problem than the Vietnam War.  Many of the Vietnam Veterans had volunteered to go back to Vietnam after returning home because of the rejection they received from citizens in the United States.

What America had forgotten is they were the ones who created the killing machine they no longer needed these boys to be.  Now they were home, now no enemy to kill.  How were they supposed to turn it off?  These were young boys whose souls were left on the battlefield in ways you would never image.  When the Vietnam Veterans returned home, they looked whole and okay but that was only the outer shale of what had left to go fight the war.  These young boys’ minds and souls were not equipped to carry back to the states what their eyes had witnessed on the battlefields of Vietnam, in the tunnels and jungles.  Where nights in the jungles were darker than a nebulas in space, a black hole.  What they were hiding when they returned is something a person who has not been in a war could understand.

When I talk about the soul of the soldier I am talking about his laughter, his smile, his innocence that was taken away since you can only be a child once.  What our American citizens could not see is what took place on the battlefield, what fed their instinct to want to survive.  Soldiers watching their comrades being shot down, killed in action, some blown apart.  While fighting for the cause of protecting the "Free World."  Rejected and hated for giving their life, their innocence for you.

The soldiers who either joined or were drafted are the real victims.  They never received the respect they earn and deserved from the American people after returning from Vietnam back to the United States.

Since the Vietnam War, “Agent Orange” has been a major factor historically in America as well as Vietnam.  Where nothing has grown in the 39,000 square miles of land “Agent Orange was sprayed over in Vietnam.  Agent Orange remains to this day a major factor not only in the Vietnam Veterans lives because its reach extended beyond its expectations.  We are now looking at the Vietnam Veterans children, grandchildren and possibly their great grandchildren.  “Agent Orange” has transferred genetically into their DNA.  This is why I am asking the federal government for more funding and more research to be done so we all can get a better understanding on how “Agent Orange” functions.

The United States Air Force flew over 6500 mission over the jungles of Vietnam spraying 20,000,000 gallons of the six agents being used.  Out of the 20,000,000 gallons of herbicide sprayed 11,000,000 gallons was “Agent Orange”.  President John F. Kennedy gave the order to begin the use of the herbicides to kill the foliage in the jungles to assist the military with the ability to maneuver.  Neither President Kennedy nor Lyndon B. Johnson were involved in the creation of the chemicals used.  This is where the mix up begins with the soldiers thinking the United States government did this to them when all this time it was the chemicals company’s creation, “Agent Orange.”  President Kennedy and nor did President Johnson have any knowledge or submit any format to the chemicals companies to follow to create such a horrifying chemical.  It was all the chemical company’s personal mixtures.  The Vietnam Veterans are suffering, and the areas in Vietnam where “Agent Orange” was sprayed 50 years ago nothing is growing.  The Vietnam Veterans have suffered greatly.  What is quietly kept is the extreme suffering of the Vietnamese.  The souls of the American soldiers who fought in Vietnam were left in a foreign land on the battlefield.